Plataformas de Innovación Social Madrid ItdUPM. 14/12/2017 @GEspiau

The context for social innovation

Intractable social problems

The classic tools of government policy on the one hand, and market solutions on the other, have proved grossly inadequate to solve social problems. The market, by itself, lacks the incentives and appropriate models to solve many of these issues. Where there are market failures (due to non-competitive markets, externalities or public goods), these tasks have fallen either to the state or civil society. However, current policies and structures of government have tended to reinforce old rather than new models. The silos of government departments are poorly suited to tackling complex problems which cut across sectors and nation states. Traditional approaches understand that “Civil society lacks the capital, skills and resources to take promising ideas to scale”.

Rising costs

The prospective cost of dealing with these issues threatens to swamp public budgets. As in climate change, pollution control, waste reduction, poverty and welfare programmes, the most effective policies are preventative. But effective prevention has been notoriously difficult to introduce, in spite of its apparent economic and social benefits.

Old paradigms

As during earlier technological and social transformations, there is a disjunction between existing structures and institutions and what’s needed now. This is as true for the private as for the social economy. New paradigms tend to flourish in areas where the institutions are most open to them, and where the forces of the old are weak. So, for example, there is more innovation around self-management of diseases and public health than around hospitals; more innovation around recycling and energy efficiency than around large scale energy production; more innovation around public participation than in parliaments and assemblies; and more innovation around active ageing than around pension provision.

Beyond the smart city

Urban territories are facing tremendous challenges in being able to offer socially sustainable environments. Technology is not the only solution when cities in particular are becoming the natural ecosystem for inequality. (MIT Technology Review).

The wealthiest, the “squeezed middle” and the growing poorest couldn’t live physically closer to each other.

Whilst there are huge amounts of innovative and creative work within urban areas, many of society’s most complex problems also manifest themselves here – unemployment, poverty, pollution and social mobility to name but a few.

Complex system approach

The consequences of inequality in urban contexts, often described as ‘wicked’ problems for their complex, entrenched, and interconnected nature are too often addressed in a short-term or fragmented way. Even the most successful interventions always acknowledged that the challenges we are tackling are too complex and interrelated to be transformed applying a technical “project delivery” mentality.

‘The more demanding the innovation challenges like poverty, ill health or environmental damage, the greater becomes the importance of effective policy. This is not a question of “picking winners”. Instead, it is about engaging widely across society, in order to build the most fruitful conditions for deciding what “winning” even means’. Stirling (2014)

Incremental V. disruptive innovation

INCREMENTAL Incremental social innovation operates within existing frameworks in order to deliver new solutions to address ‘market failures’

STRUCTURAL Structural social innovation reconfigures markets, structures, institutions or organisations in the process of innovating

DISRUPTIVE

Disruptive social innovation provides entirely new models for organising markets and/or social interactions. Instead of operating within or adapting existing models it creates entirely new ones which come to change our frameworks of understanding.

Urban social innovation

Many city leaders share the aspiration of generating socially sustainable ecosystems with the potential to incubate disruptive innovations that will tackle the structural causes of inequality. Social Innovation and Social entrepreneurship are the new “buzz words” but most of the time we are renaming existing fields. Are we looking for incremental or disruptive innovation?

An entrepreneurial city

“A City/Region/State is entrepreneurial when it is able and willing to invest in areas of extreme uncertainty, courageously envisioning the direction of change across public agencies and departments.

An entrepreneurial City/Region/State must welcome, rather than fear, the high risk and uncertainty across the entire innovation chain (from basic research to commercialization) and the experimentation processes required for organisational learning along the way (Hirschman, 1967; Rodrik, 2013). Most importantly, an entrepreneurial state must ‘think big.”

“Beyond Market Failures: shaping and creating the digital market”. Mariana Mazzucato 2014

New tools

More interconnected and larger scale interventions need to be co-created until a genuine movement of transformation is generated at the city/region level. Projects need to be incorporated as necessary tools of the “transformation movement” but always integrated within a deeper aspirational goal.

These city movements can only be co-created generating a new narrative of transformation capable of connecting the identity of the territory with a “collective decision” to build a socially sustainable city, proud to be associated with, proud to be living in.

Culture and Identity building

Identity building is therefore an evolving process that can be positively or negatively channelled through collective action. Those cities and territories who have been able to associate themselves with a positive narrative of transformation are more resilient and socially sustainable, even more competitive.

Projects need to be incorporated as necessary tools of the “transformation movement” but always integrated within a deeper aspirational goal.

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Strategic projects, policies and decisions can be described as Innovation Hardware, but local culture provides the necessary Transformation Software. Culture is understood as the set of values, principles and narratives that inform and condition the strategic decisions and projects that makes city transformation possible. Projects, policies and decisions can be replicated but they will never work if they are not intrinsically connected, inspired by and responding to the demands of the local culture and identity. City hardware is, therefore, useless without the proper social innovation software.

Social Innovation Software and Hardware

Transaccional Vs. Relacional

Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

El Caso Vasco

Challenging the current innovation paradigm

Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

Social Permission to Innovate

In some communities, even when people try to make change happen or to socially innovate, it is not recognised by others as a valid action, or is not given

‘permission to act’. People perceive they cannot do things because people like them are not responsible. They are acting to make change happen all the

time but it isn’t recognised.

But we have also documented that in different contexts communities – individuals or people – have not always gone along with this idea that they

shouldn’t act or cannot help themselves. One way in which communities engage with inequality narratives is by actively countering them. They tell a

different story, share a different vision, and ascribe different meaning to the same facts. We call these counter-narratives. Counter narratives emerge

independently of the dominant narrative and in spite of it. They draw on community knowledge and community-centric values.

In certain situations, people can generate the permission to act for themselves, through social means: self-belief, acting on shared values, and by

supporting each other. They can tell themselves that they and others can do something .They don’t need specific skills or authority. They just need an

attitude to be willing to help make change happen.

This gives them the ‘social permission to act’. It is based and driven by shared values and actions. The success of community-led innovation is that it is

social and community-based. People take actions and are supported by the community, who often join them because they trust them and believe in their

ideas. (Hodgson 2016)

Building the commons

DRAFT – Confidential. Do Not Distribute.

Amplifier Montreal Innovation Platform

2.- Co-creation

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Community actions

Small and Medium size innovation projects

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Mapping of listening initiatives

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1.- Listening Platform/ Montreal Observatory

Policy actions

Montreal Innovation Platform

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